Modern consumer electronics, such as game consoles, notebook computers, smart phones, personal digital assistants, and location based services devices, as well as enterprise class electronics, such as servers, storage arrays, and routers, are packing more integrated circuits into an ever shrinking physical space with expectations for decreasing cost. Contemporary electronics expose integrated circuits to more demanding and sometimes new environmental conditions, such as cold, heat, and humidity requiring the overall system to provide robust thermal management solutions. Higher performance, more functions, lower power usage, and longer usage off battery power are yet other expectations upon contemporary electronics.
Competitive market pressures often push companies to provide the latest and the greatest available technologies in their electronic products. Some of these technologies include integrated circuits such as processors, central processing unit (CPU), or graphics processing unit (GPU). These same competitive market pressures often push companies to provide cost reduction of the newest technologies in their products. In addition, market competition may push for other improvements in the electronics such as performance, features, and operation under battery power.
The time span from product conception to development to production and through end of life may require the development platform to differ from the production platform. For example, a product may be conceived with a processor that is not yet available. During product development, a prototype version of the processor may be used to develop and debug the product. The prototype version may not have all the functionality designed or working. The product may enter production with yet a different version of the processor. The initial production version may differ from the prototype version in a number of ways, such as more functionality. While in production, the product may undergo enhancement from the original production release product. The enhancements may include a faster and longer battery life processor. However, existing products cannot take advantage of any improvements or advancements made in enhanced processor since they were built with the processor available at that time.
Thus, a need still remains for an electronic system with a dynamic feature selection based on processor upgrades providing lower power consumption, longer battery life operation, lower cost manufacturing, improved yield, higher reliability, and additional features for the electronic systems. In view of the ever-increasing need to save costs and improve efficiencies, it is more and more critical that answers be found to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.